Life As We Knew It

Miranda is sixteen and lives in rural Pennsylvania. Her life is ordinary: classes, her friends, a boy she likes, and dinners where the family squabbles. Then an asteroid hits the Moon and shoves it closer to Earth, and the ordinary days stop.

Tsunamis and earthquakes wreck the coasts. Volcanoes throw ash across the sky, and the temperature falls. Power and running water fail, the shops empty, and winter settles in with no sign of lifting.

The book is a young adult novel told entirely in Miranda's diary entries. Through them, she records how her mother, her older brother Matt and her younger brother Jonny stockpile food, chop firewood and ration every meal. They end up crowded into a single warm room of the house.

As the disaster shrinks her world, the questions shrink with it: what the family can eat, what they can burn, what they can bear. Talks with her mother, her brothers and her devout friend Megan press on what makes survival worth its cost. The tone is bleak, though it leans toward hope.

The Last Survivors series opens here. Two further books follow it: The Dead and the Gone and This World We Live In.